A farewell to arms: Making Limbs – 7/11/14

A farewell to arms: Making Limbs

By James Spavold, senior, Becker College

 At this point it is safe to say that many people have played a match three game (cough, cough Candy Crush Saga), or a variant of the genre. Match three was the idea given to us to brainstorm about at the beginning of MassDiGI’s SIP, so we took it as far as we could. Starting with “we should throw ragdoll limbs at a wall; that could be fun”, and from then on that was the idea that we embraced. Eventually taking on a mad scientist feel and a more friendly robot zombie limb approach, after much debate, Limbs moved forward out of the planning phase.

Limbs features a little alien kid named LAK, but he has a few problems. He came to your planet to make some friends, but those friends eventually turned against him and you must protect him. Of course, you do this by throwing limbs at those that turn against LAK. Combat isn’t just simply matching three colors; you need to plan ahead for certain limb combinations that make combo creatures. Limbs tries to break the boring routine of match threes and offers interesting battle mechanics that effect the game board as a whole. Plus, throwing ragdoll limbs at an enemy is extremely satisfying.

The team that is making Limbs become reality consists of five students from five different colleges, and we had never met each other before this.

• Renzo Heredia – Audio Engineer and Composer – from Berklee College
• Andrew Krischer – Producer and Programmer – from Northeastern University
• Sienna McDowell – 2D Artist – from WPI
• Catherine Shen – Art Director, 2D Artist and UI Designer – from RISD
• James Spavold – Lead Programmer and Build Manager – from Becker College

Working in the team has been a great experience for all of us. Personally, I have worked in a handful of teams in my college career, and they have been on both ends of the spectrum. This has definitely been the most motivated team I have ever been on. At first SIP’s eleven weeks seems like a large amount of time, then you start and get halfway through the process and it feels like no time is left. Even when our team hit that point, we didn’t lose much motivation, and this was the first time that one of my teams has powered through that.

It feels great to be working in this environment. Meeting my team, and also the other teams working alongside us, was a great opportunity. Not only to make games and extend your network, but also to make some great friends with similar interests and feelings towards games. With this great atmosphere, working forty hour weeks isn’t that bad at all. In fact coming into work feels great knowing that by the end we will have a fun and interesting game to show our friends, family, and future employers that we made start to finish.

You can follow us on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/LimbsTheGame or on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/LimbsTheGame